They should be supporting the use of active defense over passive defense. What is so fundamentally deeper about a game that encourages players to stack up toughness and vitality? That doesn't improve a player's skill nor does it in any way measure their ability to understand content. Reaching 25% HP and dropping my healing turret is one of the most mindless mechanics of playing my engineer. On the contrary, using Rocket Boots to evade away, using Gear Shield to block attacks, using condition removal skills, etc. etc. are the kind of things that ArenaNet should be actively pursuing in the development of future PvE content.

You're correct that passive defense doesn't do anything for the individual dps player. And in groups formed entirely of dps players, requiring them to use some passive stats won't change how they play at all. But that's not the point. The point is by giving room for groups of diversified players in which some can then focus more on dps by using glass cannon specs and gear, and allowing others to use active abilities to make up for their teammates' lack of passive stats. In this model you can choose to have a bunch of dps players who all use balanced stats, or for those who want to have diversified roles you can choose to do so and have it be at least as viable. (I say at least because I think that ultimately people who have diversified groups should be rewarded by being slightly more effective, because creating those kinds of group synergies is more difficult. But I would settle for just as effective.)

Some of us would prefer to not be in groups where everyone is just dps with different utilities. I understand that you're not one of us, but I hope you can understand our arguments. It's about allowing different playstyles to be used in different levels of skilled play, as opposed to just being relegated to the unskilled or in situations where people haven't learned encounters yet.

Players won't feel forced to invest in the highest DPS gear to be efficient.

You don't need to have ascended gear to be efficient, though. A character wearing full Berserker exotics will deal less damage than someone in ascended, but at 25 vulnerability, 25 might, with a couple fiery greatswords and a banner of discipline or frost spirit, you're going to efficiently burn through shit: ascended or not.

I completed my dungeon master title with nothing but ascended rings. Everything else was exotic. So I'm not sure where you're coming from claiming that ascended is needed to be "efficient." I remember very well plowing through Arah path 4 in barely a couple hours with everyone in exotics, with all five of us it being our first time through.

Player skill is still the definitive measure of how quickly you complete a dungeon, not the gear you're wearing. If everyone is proficient and knows what they're doing, you'll still finish HotW p1 in under ten minutes in full exotics. The only area this isn't the case is fractals, which is obviously what ascended gear was designed for.

The funniest thing about all of this is one night we were burning through CoF, AC, SE, and TA. We were clearing through stuff almost as fast as I've ever seen it. By the end of the night I realized I left my Predator with Soldier stats. I forgot to swap back to Berserker after Tequatl. Gear is certainly very important, but player ability and ideal group composition is really what is most important. Going from exotic to ascended might make a huge contribution to damage output, but so does making sure people blast fire fields and stack vulnerability---if not more so.

Rashaki, on 19 January 2014 - 01:12 AM, said:

It's about allowing different playstyles to be used in different levels of skilled play, as opposed to just being relegated to the unskilled or in situations where people haven't learned encounters yet.

Different play styles, such as ... what, exactly?

You can build your characters to be more supportive if you want to be more supportive. A thief can convert himself from a single-target DPS king into a boon battery through Bountiful Theft and Thrill of the Crime. He can maintain perma blind throughout fractals and carry his group through everything that isn't Dredge. But if that one does come up, he's more than welcome to just stealth them through it anyway. A guardian can perma-buff his group with protection and equally carry even the worst group through any fractal or dungeon path in the game. He won't kill much himself but he'll certainly outlive them.

These are two example builds that are very popular in fractals that prioritize support over DPS. And every class has the potential to be a supportive/control role, and there is already pre-existing content within the game like Twilight Arbor Aetherpath and Tequatl that pushes people into this direction. Could they make more armor sets better tailored to these roles? Sure. I think they should come out with boon/condition duration gear that isn't actually terrible outside of World vs. World. I'd like to see some rune sets and sigils that are equal to what Scholar runes are for DPS builds.

But anything more than this would just be a game that has dedicated tanks and healers in it. And that is just not what Guild Wars 2 is about or intends to be.

I pretty much stopped playing after a few weeks and long before I got a char to level 80. I played GW for 6 years. I have a guild who are very loyal, very helpful and I love them dearly and miss playing with them.

I am not sure what was so magical about GW and why it is missing in GW2 but for me GW was fun all the way (except the solo missions they introduced near the end) and GW2 felt like a grind from the start.

Would gems bring me back? nope, I don't want stuff, I want fun gameplay with my friends.
Would new content bring me back? nope, never got far with the old content ^^

I have no idea what, if anything, would bring me back to GW2 but all it would take to bring me back to GW is for my friends to start playing again.

Anyways, even though I personally like dps meters I don't think they are good for the community as a whole since it adds a competing factor, and a reason to look down upon other players which is something at least I want to see as little as possible in any game. Sure, it has its benefits, but the consequences can be dramatic to say the least...

I actually think their Magic Find "solution" doesn't go far enough. Instead of them just removing it from gear, I would honestly prefer it be removed from the game entirely (and the drop rates be made actually reasonable). I have never seen, nor do I see now a reason that one person should have a better chance at good drops than another person, other than that given by simply playing the game more. Setting drops to be crappy by default and then making players actively work to not have crappy drops (whether it's through account bound MF, or consumable MF, or just about any other form of MF) is grindy poor design in my opinion.

Very little. Every day it's like a debate with myself, asking myself what reason I might have to log in. Sometimes I get a "high tide" of motivation where I'll log in and do a few things, but I inevitably get tired of endlessly spamming the same ten weapon skills (and it has to be those ten, as the other weapons are even worse/more boring).

There are no armor skins I want, no weapon skins I could ever actually get with a reasonable amount of effort, and the content-based goals are just a chore. I haven't finished the personal story and have no desire to, I can't finish mapping Straits of Devastation because there is never, ever, ever anyone there to help take the Balthazar temple. Even if I could, it wouldn't matter because I hate WvW so much I'd never complete the mapping there anyway.

I'm tired of taking 10 minutes to kill a ridiculous damage-sponge world boss only to be "rewarded" by an endless stream of worthless blues and greens. All guilds are filled with foul-mouthed teenage brats who expect me to get on voicechat and listen to their harangue even while doing content that in no way requires close coordination (almost all PvE, in other words). I've done all the dungeoning I care to, was dissuaded from ever even trying fractals due to the elitism and gearcheck...I could go on, but I'm sure you get the idea.

I don't usually permit myself the luxury of such unfocused whining (as opposed to more specific point-by-point whining, which I do a lot of), but you asked, so.

I've come to the conclusion that people only drop the "grind" bomb when the content itself is not intrinsically fun.

That's because that's exactly when grind becomes perceptible. Repeating any task at all for an expected reward is grind, but we don't recognize it as grind if we enjoy that task. Instead it's fun, enjoyable content. But when the content is no longer fun, our willingness to repeat that task is greatly diminished, and we recognize it as grind.

This has already been brought up and stated many times here before. Some people have much higher tolerances for the tasks they're willing to repeat over and over, and those people will complain far less about any "grind." Whereas some players, myself included, don't get a lot of enjoyment out of such content, and will be a bit quicker to drop the "grind" bomb.

ArenaNet really need to take every single aspect of the game and improve upon it as much they can, one by one. The game itself feels far from polished and there is just so much that they could expand upon. They claim to have over a hundred staff in the new team. I don't know much about the coding that goes into developing an MMO, but from what I can tell, there must be only a small fraction of that hundred staff ever working on the game at a time. They promised so much before the game came out and it's fallen increadibly short of even the lowest expectations. I thought ArenaNet were supposed to be different...

If you are still enjoying GW2 and/or happy with ArenaNet, that's fine and I'm happy for you.

---

Some of you may recognize me (mainly for my math posts) if you frequent the same forums/sections as I do.

I used to be quick to defend ArenaNet on many points, but recently I can't help but think of the many things that have continued to aggravate me.

Lack of quality control

Patch days turn into a patch for the patch for the patch for the patch for the patch ... followed the next day by another patch for the patch for the patch.

The big WvW patch broken WvW ... you'd have thought someone would test that patch to see if it broke the thing it was designed for.

There is quite a bit of evidence that their codebase is horrible

The patch days mentioned above

Targeted patches breaking their target (as mentioned above)

Patches one thing breaking other things completely unrelated to the patch ... like Mesmer spear having no working hitbox after a patch a few months ago ... when there were no patches to it

Illusionary Leap for Mesmer's being broken/"fixed" on an almost per patch basis (undocumented too).

Inconsistencies in their code such as Thief basilisk venom having an undocumented immobilize on top of the stun which the state of the game highlighted

Still haven't fixed (or can't) Mesmer clones' not having offhands

Still haven't fulfilled (or can't) their promise of allowing 2hand weapons to have 2 sigils so they can be on the same footing as weapon sets that use two 1hand weapons.

How long it has taken them to actually make NPCs invulnerable in WvW

Still bad AI plaguing several classes ... two of which AI plays a large part of their class mechanics.

Groups getting bugged because a player leaves the game without leaving their party

Ranged attacks that are still randomly obstructed when the attacker and target are both on equal ground with nothing but open field between the two of them

Broken/Unfulfilled Promises

As previously stated, during BWEs, ArenaNet promised the community that they would make it so that 2hand weapons could have 2 sigils so that those weapon sets could have the same number of sigils as weapon sets using two 1hand weapons ... where is this fix?

The WvW patch was promised to change the WvW meta a bit and give players a reason to still care about WvW when the matchup was an overwhelming win/loss.

There are no new activities in WvW

The meta is still Zerg v Zerg

Most servers (if not all) have been fighting the same other two servers for going on two months now

For me, personally, this means Ehmry Bay stomping both Borliss Pass and Anvil Rock has gotten very old ... a challenge would be nice ... perhaps a chance to actually lose other than "only if we don't show up"

Instead we got WvW XP and levels ... which only affect NPCs and siege

Siege is largely for taking/defending points ... which matter less when the matchup isn't close.

There will be "no gear grind" ... except we added in ascended gear which has you grinding fractals and/or guild missions unless you want to be very patient with dailies ... and we were told there would eventually be ascended quality for other gear slots in the future ... "can't wait" to see what additional currency they add to get that ... *sigh*.

Appear to be "bad at math"

If you read any articles by different game companies or blogs of individual developers, you'll often see that they create a sort of "Average Joe" test dummy to test things on as far as pacing, OP, UP, etc.. It is a standard operating procedure to establish a baseline

Despite this, ArenaNet has been having to devote time now to changing how classes work because they realized that they allowed people to be killed in 1-2s if a glass cannon hits a non-tanky target.

This has Thieves in a period of flux where they are having to be changed because "burst or die" isn't good gameplay

Please note that I'm well aware of very good non-glass tanky Thieves builds ... I'm actually a fan of Sword + Dagger

Warriors have been harmed further in PvP by some of these changes

If you do the math for the various cooldown changes, you'll notice that some of them give you more or less than the 20% described by the trait.

Notice we are still getting large sweeping changes to various things' damages? Arrow cart has received two 50% changes recently ... they were that far off, eh?

Remember when Thief's Dancing Dagger hit for 6k to 8k, was ranged, spammable, didn't require stealth, and hit up to 4 targets? Lol.

Failure w/ Implementation of "No Holy Trinity"

What is bad about having a holy trinity?

It creates a higher demand for some classes over others for group play (tanks and healers > dps)

It can create non-interesting fights where you simply /assist tank + autoattack

What do we have in Guild Wars 2?

The status of Guardians, Warriors, and Mesmers as "the top 3" ... due to what they can bring compared to others and how it weighs in relative to current content and what it demands

Several groups asking specifically for "Guardians" or "Heavies"

Several groups asking people to not play their Ranger, Engineer, Thief, etc. for dungeons

Ever seen someone say "we have too many Guardians/Warriors/Mesmers" ? Probably not ... but I bet you have for other classes.

What do we do in most boss fights? Stand at range and auto-attack supplemented by some other skills

Occasionally do a dodge roll.

E-Sport Quality Combat ... where?

As has been stated by "the pros", there is too much use of random numbers in combat

Crit chance

on-crit sigils

on-crit traits

other procs

skills with random effects

Imbalances in classes

Notice that there are a few classes that are used consistently by the top tier tPvP teams.

Notice that there are a few classes that are close to never used by the top tier tPvP teams.

Still balancing the classes with how the Arenas work

Anyone here think that underwater combat has been balanced? My Mesmer and My Ranger are nightmares for people in the water ... I openly admit they are OP there.

People running the orbs ... just got a recent fix but there are still those with several more advantages than other classes ... and it isn't something that can be fixed with gear/spec changes.

Combat Being Dumbed Down

Nerf to confusion ... because avoiding the application of confusion, using condition removal, or moving/dodging without attacking for a few seconds were somehow too hard.

​Heavy forbid people have to pay attention to the color change of their screen, effect on their character, condition icon on their screen, and damage numbers popping up with a unique effect each time they mindlessly bash their skills and/or auto-attack.

Nerf to Caltrop duration ... because people weren't smart enough to not stand in the red circle filled with sharp pointy objects that bled them to death the last 20 times?

AOEs limited to 5 people ... caters to the mindless zerging

Excuse is "technical limitation" even though older MMOs didn't have this "technical limitation" despite working on older hardware.

We also have siege ignoring this "technical limitation"

We also have other effects that ignore this "technical limitation"

Some skills do "way too much" for a player ... like heartseeker. With skilled players it's just an annoying thief they mock as they kill. At the lower skill-levels, it's a player being successful at turning to face, chasing, closing any gaps, and killing just by pressing one button repeatedly

The current meta is largely "boon heavy builds". These builds have near (if not completely) 100% up-time on select boons and thus influence players to use skills "whenever off cooldown" instead of "in reaction to combat" ... this diminishes skilled play

There are builds that fall completely into paper/scissor/rock ... giving us more "build wars"

I used to not believe this till I started dueling more, I would watch Alice kick the crud out of everyone (including me), then see Alice lose to Bob, who everyone (including me) kicked the crap out of.

Bob only beat Alice because Bob's build hard counters Alice's so much that Bob would have to be horribad to lose ... and then it'd be close.

Foods, Oils, and Sharpening Stones

Part of the draw to having no gear grind is that you don't have to farm/grind/etc. (treat a game like a job) in order to have the same total stat points as someone else.

These consumable items remove that since now you need to be able to afford them constantly.

Slow day in WvW because everyone is bored? You lose some gold standing around with your bonuses

Want to spend your gold on something else? Well then I hope you farmed sometime recently or played the trading post because your money is tied up in consumables.

These also allow stats to get to ridiculous amounts ... which enables for the very quick burst fights that ArenaNet says they are trying to scale back

Ranger pets do not scale with the Ranger's stats, so as more Ascended items enter the game, the relative power of pets to players decreases in PvE and WvW. The consumables exacerbate this problem

This is part of why Ranger pets are seen as being much stronger in sPvP than they are in PvE and WvW.

There is also the lemongrass poultry. -40% condition duration. Non-removable.

Conditions are already largely seen by the community as being "weaker" than direct damage in many parts of the game due to conditions stack caps, abundance of combo fields in WvW, condition removals, not affecting inanimate objects (siege, gates, etc.)

Now we have a food that lowers your condition duration (and thus damage) by 40% ... and because of the way condition damage works, this rounds up.

The power of these foods can be see by how the meta changed for some classes when the lifesteal on food was given an internal cooldown on its proc.

ArenaNet's treatment of the community

ArenaNet is very hush-hush about even their high-level designs for the game.

They ignore the wonderful things that have come from game companies having very free and open communication with their communities ... both for previous MMOs as well as upcoming ones.

If you want people to continue to invest in you, you could at least respect them enough to tell them what your ideas are ... even at a high-level.

Heck having test servers would shoot two birds with one stone as they could convey ideas to the community while getting some free-testing ... it could even help make patch days only need 1 patch ... instead of 5 and a few more the next day.

If you go to any non-ArenaNet-controlled GW2 forum, you'll inevitably run into a post about someone complaining about the moderation on ArenaNet's forums

These threads often end up with some people replying that they actually take advantage of it to "troll better" as they try to bait people into saying things or simply click on "look at all posts by Bob" and then report all those posts they think they have even a small chance of nailing "Bob" on.

Some of us (myself included) have tickets that are over a week old. Seeing as how the last time I had a ticket, it was answered in a matter of hours, measuring the current wait time in weeks is a bit ridiculous.

What's more aggravating for me personally is that I'm encountering the exact same issue two more times, something their community director, Eric "Dalmarus" Campbell, apologized to me for having happened before ... yet now I'm stuck dealing with it because they have yet to so much as acknowledge receiving it ... even though it is on my list of "My Stuff" at support.guildwars2.com.

Gameplay is boring the heck out of me

PvE

Dungeons - we run them for skins (or CoF p1 for money) or badges for a legendary. It gets extremely boring running the same dungeon over and over again.

The content is quite boring. It's often cripple melee opponents, block/reflect projectiles, assist on the called target. Nothing really new there.

Most people that do dungeons, because they are so boring, constantly look for ways to circumvent as much content as possible ... and are successful

We still have dungeon content whose difficulty can be circumvented by hiding in a corner ... even with new content like with the Living Story's Molten Facility and the "machine boss" near the beginning.

Legendaries are simply "I have lots of money" or "I did the grind". There isn't anything legendary about them. You ran the same dungeon X number of times to get 500 tokens. You gathered/bought a large number of materials. You jumped/fought in WvW for "badges of jumping". Kudos.

Fractals are the same few fractals every time. The higher levels don't add anything really meaningful. They just make it more punishing to get hit.

Guild Missions are made stupidly trivial given a large number of people

If the first person that entered the dungeon leaves group, etc., the entire group is dropped from the dungeon ... why?! ... this allows some people to be jerks and/or troll people and I don't see the benefit.

Zerg vs Zerg ... throw random AOE, tab target, and auto-attack random people in a horde of 30+ as a horde of 30+ do the same to your horde.

There are some zerg-busting groups, but I've found most of those I know of on my server are bored with the game ... so not nearly on as much any more ... so now there's much less zerg busting.

You're not on siege and you're not defending the walls? Good luck to you with some classes as you can't hit people on the wall who can hit you because your character only knows how to aim at genitals (or lower) ... we'll ignore that you can see 3/4 of the enemy's body.

Throw siege around like candy because you can get it from jumping puzzles that you didn't really do because Mesmers are portaling people in large droves to the end ... they also get more "Tokens of Jumping" from this.

sPvP

Sadly, these little one-off matches are where the highest level of skill can be leveraged ... however

Even the "pros" have been complaining about how it quickly gets boring. There are mechanics in each one, but they are largely ignored in favor of simply capping and controlling the points. Lack of any real variation

Anyone who sPvP'd a large amount already has collected the large amount of skins available.

Pick-up matches are, again, mindless zergfests because all they have to do is <tab> - auto-attack because numbers is what really matters in most cases

It is still far from being esport-worthy ... randomness, imbalances, etc. ... claimed to be esport quality combat and here we are over half a year later. Heroes of Newerth, another Moba amongst a sea of Moba games, was picked up quicker than this.

I like this game very much, but I just can't get into GW2 lore. I tend to prefer greyer, grittier settings (e.g. Gothic), and GW2 is as high fantasy as you can get.

Also... The story itself is so many kinds of cliche and corny. Same goes for most of the characters. The only times I really enjoyed it was in the more light-hearted, humorous parts (e.g. Tybalt), where the game didn't take itself too seriously.

The game has many strong points, but story is not one of them IMO.

I see what you mean. My favourite parts of the story are the lower level race specific bits, as they feel more personal.

I feel like they tried to tack on a resemblance to the GW1 story to keep the people who like the lore interested, while making it stand-alone so people who didn't play GW1 wouldn't be left out. To me, it seems like they should have picked one of these options and stuck to it, rather than creating a poor mix of the two.

There are also quite a few of us that do not see how they have lied at all in the manifest though, even if you took it as an absolute unchangeable truth.

I'll help you out:

1. Guild Wars 2 is our opportunity to question everything - This isn't so much a lie as a reason why nobody should be upset when we, the customers, question everything as well.

2. Guild Wars 2 takes everything you love about Guild Wars 1 and puts it into a persistent world - Besides the world of Tyria, there is absolutely nothing in this game that is like GW1 in any way shape or form.

3. We just don't want players to grind in Guild Wars 2. - Almost everything in Guild Wars 2 is a grind. Leveling is a massive grind, dungeon tokens are are a grind, badges of honor are a grind, ascended gear is a grind, legendaries are a grind, dailies are a grind, monthlies are a grind, karma is a grind. What in this game isn't a grind?

4. As a structure, the MMO has lost the ability to make the player feel like a hero. - Two word. Screw Traeherne.